[Jobs] [JOB] Contract, good pay rate, West End London

[Nik Clayton]

I'm shortly upping sticks and moving to Switzerland, which means that my 
current employer needs to find someone to fill my shoes.

Perl is used as the glue here between two key technologies.

There's Autosys, which you might consider to be cron on steroids. 
Locally developed Perl programs are used to maintain the Autosys job 
list, which is generated by a mix of configuration data managed in XML, 
and a large collection of TT templates.  As well as maintaining the 
tools you get to take job definitions from other groups, and massage 
them in to the local configuration format ready for deployment to dev, 
UAT, and production environments.  There are ancillary tools surrounding 
this too -- e.g., tools to report on the trends of job run times, assist 
in prioritising job order so that reports come out on time, that sort of 
thing.  Maintaining these tools, and identifying and writing new tools 
as-and-when is all part of the role.

Familiarity with TT is essential.  We have our own TT plugins and 
filters, so you should be comfortable with that.

Then there's Murex.  This is a large financial application.  Perl is 
used to script reports out of this (typically as chunks of XML), carry 
out conversion to CSV, perform loads in to databases, and so on.  We 
also write tools to help work around Murex bugs -- for example, we have 
a tool that compares two different reports (which might only differ in 
the order in which trades are extracted) to see where Murex has derived 
different values for those trades, and generate HTML and Excel 
presentations of those differences.

Then there's the other bits -- for example, code that takes reports (as 
CSV or XML), splits it interesting ways, munges it through a few 
templates, and e-mails it out.  Or code that compares job run-times 
before and after various changes have been made to database filters to 
see whether there's been significant benefit in the change.  And so on.

You don't necessarily need to have encountered either of these before -- 
I hadn't, but previous experience (esp. of Autosys) would be helpful. 
You'll also need to be able to hit the ground running with (k)sh 
scripting, as that's the other bit of glue in use.  You should be able 
to use CVS.  Familiarity with databases (Sybase) and SQL is also needed. 
  You don't need to be a DBA (we have those) but you should be able to 
look at a piece of SQL and work out what it does.

This is a contract role, located a few minutes walk from Green Park and 
Piccadilly Circus tube stations.  The hours are 8am-6pm, and the rate is 
good.  I'm well aware of the discussions on london.pm and jobs-discuss, 
and I know that everyone would like to know the rate.  I'd love to 
advertise it here too, but the company would rather I didn't, so I'm not 
about to say so on a mailing list with a public archive.  So you'll just 
have to take my word for it when I say that it's exactly what you'd 
expect for contract work for a financial house.

There's an on-call component, typically one week on, one week off.  The 
on call rate is a flat 1/10th of the daily rate for being on-call, and 
then if you're called, everything after the first hour is 1/10th of the 
daily rate per hour.  If you're called there's remote access in to the 
network, at which point you can "remote desktop" to your PC and work 
away.  This is also how any occasional working from home (if, say, 
you've had a family emergency) is supported.

The development environment is a Windows PC, plus whatever tools you're 
happy with.  In my case, that's a VMWare kubuntu image...

If I wasn't migrating southwards I'd be quite happy to stay here.  If 
you can manage the hours this is a great opportunity to come in to a 
small team (currently two, shortly to be one until this role is filled) 
and make a difference.  It also doesn't require specialist financial 
knowledge, but there are plenty of opportunities to pick that up along 
the way.

Interested?  If so, get your CVs to Yvonne.Heslop at brevanhoward.com (and 
definitely not to my address please).

N